How can an international charity accept credit card payments?

To accept credit cards online in the US, for both commercial and non-profit entities, you will need either your own merchant account or a third-party payment processor.

Having your own merchant card processing account will provide the lowest payment acceptance rates - currently no more than 2.19% + $0.25 per transaction. In order to set up a merchant account in the US, you will need your organization to have a legal presence here. In other words you will need at least a subsidiary to be registered in the US and to have a bank account and address here.

If that is not an option, you can open an offshore merchant account, which will allow you to accept payments in the US, but at substantially higher rates - 5% - 6% or more per transaction. The upside is that you can set it up without having to incorporate in the US. To locate offshore merchant account providers, simply Google "offshore merchant account provider".

The third option is a third-party provider like PayPal and they will not be cheap either. You can visit their pricing page and see if you can find your rate. It might be lower than an offshore merchant account service but the downside is that they tend to overprotect and freeze accounts for no good reason.

I'm curious if anyone has had any experience in working with a foreign non-profit entity. How did you solve the payment acceptance issue?

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